[qwerty456127]

Imagine a perfect world where all the separate apps just were coherent, forming a complete ecosystem and their config files were not disparate? So you would just pick a window manager you somehow like better, a panel app of your choice, launcher, sound volume, WiFi management, calculator applets you prefer... Then switch to another window manager someday... keeping everything else intact. This is the way it's meant to be, every thing you dislike is just a quirk.

[cbolton]

Yes that sounds awesome, though I'd prefer having a single config file for the window manager, status bar, notifications, application launcher, lock screen and whatever else I forgot that are in the end part of the same experience.

One particular problem is theming: I'd like to set a theme in a single place for all the elements of my desktop environment. Not sure if it's fair to expect a bunch of independent opinionated developers who like to use weird graphics toolkits (when not drawing everything by themselves) to come up with a unified solution.

Another problem is the shortcuts. It's the same problem in (neo)vim when you build your awesome IDE-like setup based on 53 unrelated packages: you end up with an illogical, overlapping soup of keybindings. I think you need someone to take charge of unifying things to provide a coherent experience.

[xn--cr8h]

Nobody actually has time for all that